Gervais / MacLeod 5: Interfaces, meritocracy, the effort thermocline, and a solution.

Today, I continue my analysis of the MacLeod hierarchy and the Gervais Principle. (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.) I’m going to analyze the interfaces between the three MacLeod tiers in order to tease out the magic that makes it all work. How do three disparate types of people get along seamlessly? What prevents the existence of the Sociopaths and Losers from “cluing in” the Clueless?

In doing this, I’ll also analyze the concept of “meritocracy” in the corporate world. Every company seems to think its internal mechanics are meritocratic. VC-istan sees itself (despite the heavily manipulated market) as the ultimate in meritocracy. Is there truth in this? That I’ll address.

The Loser/Clueless interface: differential social status

The separation between the Loser and Clueless tiers comes down to differential social status (DSS). Here, “social status” includes not only in-crowd membership and popularity, but also the hard currencies: job titles, division of labor and compensation. Based on work experience, education, and negotiation skills, people have certain “market levels” of social status that they can expect to get in a new company. The difference between what a person has at a current job and what she can get on the market in a new job is DSS.

It’s not uncommon for a person’s DSS to become negative, when she improves faster than her company allows her career to advance. She can improve her standing by finding another job. In fact, in slow-to-promote organizations, negative DSS becomes common over time. “Familiarity breeds contempt.” This may explain why most organizations do a poor job of promoting from within– they have a systematic tendency to downgrade their own people relative to outsiders, the latter being untarnished by years of political fighting. People who grow “too fast” for most companies become used to negative DSS and underestimation, and end up with a “job hopping” trajectory.

That said, most people will have DSS close to zero. Relative to the noise factor inherent in taking a new job and the tendency of social status toward illegibility, whatever they have effectively a rounding error. For our purposes, we will say people with such close-to-zero DSS have “zero DSS”. Losers, when they play social games, tend to form in-crowds that don’t matter, such as the “Finer Things Club” and the “Party Planning Committee” on The Office, but these have no effect on compensation or division of labor. They’re diversions, and they don’t generate meaningful DSS.

There are three common things that will create a non-zero DSS. The first is for management to recognize someone formally with a job title or promotion, which creates positive DSS if management takes the accolade more seriously than the external market would. The second, which generates negative DSS, is for a person to be embarrassed or develop a negative reputation among colleagues. (If that person gets a negative reputation with management, she usually just gets fired.) The third source of DSS, probably most painfully common to my readers, is for a person to improve without it being recognized. This person’s DSS goes negative not because of organizational adversity, but because the organization refuses to allow someone to advance at the rate at which she actually improves, leaving her in a role and on work that’s below her frontier of ability.

Most corporate denizens aren’t noticed in any special way by management or their colleagues at large, nor do they improve fast enough to generate the third category of DSS. The result is that it’s most common for a person’s DSS to be close to zero.

Organizations have a love/hate relationship with DSS. On one hand, it’s a means of self-definition for the organization, and a way to motivate people. Those with positive DSS are going to behave like owners, because they’ll experience a drop in working conditions, compensation, and quality of work if they lose their jobs. Those with negative DSS serve a pariah or “omega” function: a way for an organization to state what it dislikes. DSS gives organizations a banner and a way to proclaim their values by promoting those who exemplify them. On the other hand, DSS is unstable. People with negative DSS will leave, of course. Regarding positive DSS, Sociopaths and Losers, when they find themselves with it, will usually try to parlay that into persistent, outside-of-firm social status and improve their long-term career prospects. If you’re strategic and have positive DSS, this is what you want to do with it: convert it into something that’s not contingent upon one organizational role. This improvement of their external alternatives reduces that positive DSS.

With the concept of differential social status well-understood, we can approach the Loser/Clueless interface. Losers have DSS right around zero, like most people. They could get other, equivalent jobs. What keeps them loyal and in-place isn’t the economic superiority of what they have, but the fact that they prioritize comfort and stability over the potential for gain. Additionally, when Losers get positive DSS they will, because they are strategic, convert it into genuine improvement of their overall career standing. One of the most incredible moments in The Office is when Pam, a receptionist converted into an unsuccessful saleswoman, uses the organizational “fog of war” following a management takeover to invent a new job for herself– a salaried Office Manager role. Pam is a MacLeod Loser, but a smart and very strategic one who uses her positive DSS (being married to “rising star” Jim, and having been with the company for much longer than the new management) to get improvements that actually matter: a better job title and more pay. The result of this is that Losers don’t tend to build up a bankroll of DSS. They convert it into forms that are more persistent and useful. If they can rise to a higher level in the organization, they do so and become Losers there (which is better than being a Loser at a lower level.) Clueless, on the other hand, will build DSS because they never cash it in.

It’s the Clueless who climb ladders, pay dues, and take on additional responsibilities in order to develop positive DSS, which they perceive as a two-sided loyalty. Venkat Rao argued The Office to be the first American workplace drama to peer into the world of the Clueless. I disagree. Willy Loman, in The Death of a Salesman, is the archetypal literary Clueless. Loman is a true believer in the importance of being well-liked. He builds up a bunch of relationships that, in the end, don’t matter and won’t save him. The loyalty is not reciprocated. He fails to convert his transient DSS into something more stable and, as he ages, it goes away.

So, how shall we separate the Loser and Clueless tiers? Losers, in general, do not exert themselves to build up positive DSS. When they get it, they attempt to convert it into something less contingent and more permanent. Sociopaths pursue DSS but only as a mechanism to rise to the top of the organization, which means they cash it in likewise. Clueless, apart from Losers, are those who sit on a fat bankroll of untapped and local social capital. They keep their DSS as it is, being true believers and wanting to show personal investment in the company. So what differentiates Losers from Clueless is a persistent pattern of nonzero DSS.

The Clueless/Sociopath interface: the effort thermocline

More interesting than the Loser/Clueless interface is the one that separates the Clueless and Sociopath tiers: the effort thermocline. Low in the organization, jobs get harder and more demanding as one rises the ranks. Salaried office workers work harder than hourly employees. Middle managers often work harder than the people they supervise, having more to lose. In the Loser and Clueless tiers, each promotion means higher standards, longer hours, and less job security.

There’s a level at which the jobs stop getting harder with each step up, and start getting easier at a rapid rate. Middle managers, in most organizations, are glorified grunts with front-man responsibility for meeting deadlines and deliverables, but no authority to define them or set priorities. However, there’s a level in each organization where the perks of the job include autonomous control over the division of labor and an extremely lenient performance evaluation process. It’s the “good old boy” club of upper management. It’s the level at which the top brass say, “Welcome, you can breathe now.” This group can be clubby and petty like any gossip-ridden small town, and this can make life within it very stressful, but judgment based on effort and sacrifice end.

The separation between these two worlds is the effort thermocline. That thermocline is the highest that a typical organization will allow someone to rise by working hard. It’s the top of the Clueless tier, the bottom of the Sociopath capstone, and if it’s serving its purpose well, it’s a one-way mirror: opaque from below, transparent from above. Executive Sociopaths, from the other side of the thermocline, appear (from below) to be working hard. Because they control not only the division of labor but the physical space, they can manufacture the image of high effort and investment while they enjoy the comfort of a private office and take the “fun work” for themselves. Losers, to some extent, know what’s up, but they’re so far from that theatre that they don’t really care about it on a day-to-day basis. The veil is for the Clueless, who must be tricked into seeing superior Cluelessness when they look up.

The purpose of the effort thermocline is to create an image of effort-based meritocracy at the bottom. This ruse makes people work hard, and it also creates social stability because people aren’t too eager to rise. Most Losers genuinely don’t want their boss’s jobs, because they realize they’ll be expected to put forth 50-200 percent more effort in exchange for about a 20-percent pay raise. Most Clueless see their bosses as superior– more talented, more experienced– and consider themselves ineligible (at least, at the time) for the roles above them. The only people who expect to rise rapidly (skipping the demanding middle ranks if possible) are the Sociopaths. As soon as they have something to trade, they look for a market.

Above the effort thermocline, being seen as hard-working isn’t especially important. In fact, it can be detrimental. If you have to work 12 hours per day, you’re probably inefficient. Sociopaths see the sacrificial lambs in the Clueless tier as chumps. Sociopaths actually “get” organizational politics. They understand that their progress within the organization will be based not on how much of themselves they put into an impersonal, organizational meritocracy (that doesn’t exist) but on how well they trade assets with important individuals. Effort is just one asset; credibility, relationships and information are often more important, and often easier to attain.

This enables us, as well, to look at some differences between the true Psychopath and the Technocrat (“good Sociopath”). The most successful Clueless have an unconditional work ethic, while Psychopaths and Technocrats are all about working smart. They define that a bit differently, however. Psychopaths like to manipulate people; Technocrats aim for improvements and genuine efficiency. They’re both hackers, but they enjoy different kinds of hacks.

Organizations that are going to generate MacLeod classes (and I will argue, later, that they need not necessarily do so) rely heavily on the effort thermocline. It’s the spine of the organization. Just above it are the lowest-tier Sociopaths who get direct information from the base of the company. As the executive suite’s filter, they have an enormous influence over what information is presented, when, and how. Top-tier Clueless could have this power if they wanted it, but their earnestness prevents them from seeing or exploiting the editorial control they could exert. To them, furnishing information is a duty, not something to be selectively performed. Thus, the information flow into the upper ranks of the company will generally come from the Sociopaths just above that thermocline, who perform the first filter.

Top-tier Clueless provide an obvious benefit as well, which is that they set the pace for the world below them. The most dedicated, productive Clueless are held up (at least superficially) as role models for the organization. Additionally, they take final responsibility for operational issues. Low-level Losers can blame circumstances for failures, nonproductivity, and mistakes. If the Loser’s computer breaks, he can sit tight and wait for IT to fix it. The perk of being a Loser is that the organization is tacitly responsible for maintaining your work conditions. Sociopaths cleverly define their jobs so as to have no hard responsibilities or deliverables. It ends up being the Clueless who are held responsible for keeping the lights on, resolving communication difficulties, and doing the ugliest work.

Technology, VC-istan, and meritocracy…

In my last post, I discussed the pseudo-meritocracy of VC-istan. What makes VC-istan successful is that it generates a context in which highly intelligent people can be rendered Clueless. When the ruse is new, peoples’ psychological immune systems haven’t formed yet and the smartest people, who would converge to MacLeod Loserism or Sociopathy in a normal corporation, can buy into it. Free markets are, on their own terms, meritocratic. The heavily manipulated market (by VCs and acquirers) looks like such. What makes VC-istan so brilliant is that the effort thermocline is extra-organizational. It’s not an organizational promotion that launches a person beyond the veil. It requires getting an entirely different job description.

For hard technological work, the MacLeod hierarchy is clearly dysfunctional. Losers are good at delivering grunt work reliably, but it tends to require a large number of them to do a major project. In technology, the result of this is intolerable communication overhead. Clueless tend to solve the wrong problems, unless micromanaged. Sociopaths, if they turn “black hat”, are outright dangerous. Whatever it is that causes the MacLeod hierarchy to emerge, the technological world would do well to eliminate that.

VC-istan’s pretense is that it has eliminated or obsoleted the MacLeod hierarchy, which is clearly dysfunctional. That’s actually not the case. The hierarchy has re-emerged. The solution is disposable companies. Sociopaths, as anywhere, find ways to trade social assets at a profit and become the major players. Many are not investors or “tech press”; in fact, I would guess that most of the Sociopaths are executives who’ve cultivated relationships with investors and can get themselves plugged into de-risked companies with absurdly high compensation. Clueless are the ones who suffer all the pain and risk. Losers are unemployable. Over time, this Loserlessness (despite the fact there’s a lot of losing going on) bifurcates the Clueless caste into Clueless-Losers and Clueless-Sociopaths. These mid-grade classes exist as Clueless rapidly become clueful, but are generally transient states. Clueless-Sociopaths are the ones who will readily screw their colleagues over but still believe that “delivering” is more important than acquiring credibility and trading social assets. Clueless-Losers are the ones who keep faith in the lofty “vision” (read: marketing) of their companies but have learned to tolerate subordination and are gradually realizing that their future and their firm’s (or VC-istan’s) will diverge.

With all this, the MacLeod hierarchy seems to fly in the face of the high-minded concept of meritocracy. In fact, MacLeod organizations are meritocratic not only on their own terms, but on multiple sets of terms. Losers, in general, don’t care either way whether their organizations are meritocratic. They can see the lie, but it doesn’t upset or anger them, because they don’t care to play in the higher leagues where the lie is in force. However, the differential social status of the Clueless, in addition to the opacity of the effort thermocline, create the appearance of a meritocracy from a Clueless position. That keeps these “useful idiots” happy and striving. For their part, Sociopaths also perceive a meritocracy, if only because they define merit as “what you can get”. To a Sociopath, the idea that there would be any definition of merit other than raw power, status, or money is laughable.

This leads me to a brief exploration of what I call localism and globalism. I borrowed it from machine learning and mathematical modeling. A global model is one that imposes underlying structure and uses that for prediction, while a local one uses nearby data and discounts distant observations. For example, if one were to predict average annual temperatures of geographic locations, the tendency for polar locations to be colder than equatorial ones is a very strong global feature. If you were to predict temperatures based on only one variable, latitude is what you’d use, and it would serve well for the majority of places, but not all. On the other hand, local data has value insofar as it can capture variations (altitude, ocean currents) that are specific to small regions. Rome is very warm for its latitude because of the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf Stream; Lhasa, quite cold because of its altitude and continental location. Ultimately, the solution to most complex problems is going to require a mix of local and global approaches.

The age-old debate between planned and market economies is related to this. Socialism is an approach that sets social-justice standards (“no one should be without appropriate health care”) and expects to apply them globally. Central planning imposes globally-oriented solutions on a diverse world. (This is one of the reasons why Marx believed communism needed to be worldwide.) Capitalism allows individuals to exploit local information for personal profit, with the desire, because such exploitation will require trade, that some of the surplus will be dissipated into society in the process. Neither of these two approaches, standing alone, is adequate. Societies, it turns out, need both. Laissez-faire capitalism tends to diverge into undesirable states when power disparities reach a certain critical level of self-perpetuation. Without some wealth transfer back into the poor, absolute libertarian capitalism devolves into oligarchy and, as it perpetuates itself across generations, aristocracy. On the other hand, outright command economies cannot make use of the wealth of distant, local information out there and stagnate, in addition to becoming extremely corrupt. In either case, the elite becomes a locality that is both incapable of solving global problems or serving other localities, and disinterested in doing so.

Corporate organizations are an interesting beast, in this light, and it’s useful to assess how the MacLeod Clueless and Sociopaths approach them. Ultimately, the corporation’s purpose is to provide some of the security of socialism while serving a capitalist purpose on the external market. Policies are set to impose fairness constraints that are held to be global up to the extent of the organization. The corporation takes on the hard, dirty work of competing on a tooth-and-claw market, but internally, it’s supposed to provide its employees with the comfort of a well-run, stable command economy in which the demands on them and their compensation will be regular and reasonable. This is the risk transfer that Losers tolerate, which is why they can’t be considered actual “losers”. Their low compensation (from an expected-value perspective) is due to the premium they pay for this comfort and abstraction. What corporations create is a story of internal globality. Most importantly, employees get a guaranteed minimum income based on the value of their skills.

The World is big and unwieldy and heterogeneous and scary. It’s a chaotic mess. Corporations intend to create order within the mess, and leave interaction with the scary Without to an exalted caste (in truth, comprised mostly of rent-seeking Sociopaths) called “executives”. They’ll handle that stuff. Employees can live in comfort and stability.

An analogy for this might be a cruise ship, which provides the comforts of a hotel in an environment where most people lack the skills necessary to survive. Losers are happy to remain above-decks. They enjoy the abstraction. Clueless, on the other hand, want to graduate from passengers to drivers. They’re willing to deal with bilge pumps and engine rooms. They want to “learn the ropes”, as if such objective principles existed. Although they are the actual (unwitting) muscle of the company, Clueless have a childlike eagerness to become “adults”, failing to recognize what Sociopaths already know: there are no adults. In the corporate world, there is no “God”. You get what you can get.

It’s the Clueless who believe in objective corporate policies, enforce written rules because they are rules, and sustain the fiction of a globalist meritocracy where talent within the organization will always be allocated toward its best use. Sociopaths, on the other hand, tend to be aggressive localist players who already comprehend that the best way to “get ahead” is the old-fashioned, localist, way: trading favors, peddling influence, and leveraging information. Clueless believe in a paternalistic, globalist system that will take care of everyone, and intend to gradually grow into a “leadership” role. Sociopaths focus on the local problem: moving themselves forward by exploiting features and people that are close to them.

Neither localism nor globalism is innately superior but, strategically, the localist approach is bound to be more successful within the modern corporate organization. Sociopaths can be either localist or globalist in orientation but, in the workplace, they take the more effective localist approach. Sociopaths win because, ultimately, the “global-within-local” concept is, in most corporate organizations, fictional. The people running these companies have no real stake in the globalist fairness constraints put forward as the organization’s values. The real dominating behavior is localism.

For one example of the ruse, let’s consider the legal obligation of corporate executives to represent the immediate financial interests of shareholders, even if the action taken is socially irresponsible. That “obligation” doesn’t exist. It’s a fiction, designed to give what these Sociopathic executives want (aggressive, self-promoting localism) a globalist spin: it’s just the law. The Clueless buy into it, and believe that “the company” is doing all these bad things because it has no choice. What is actually happening here is that executives have figured out that there’s profit to be made in taking a localist approach, and they want in. Executives are supposed to be the fair stewards of a fairness-and-process-oriented (i.e. globalist) organization dedicated toward capitalist purposes, but they become localists within them. Managers and the more adept employees have caught on to localism as well and taken up a strategy of careerist job-hopping instead of loyalist dues-paying. Good for them, too. They get it. The result of this, on the large scale, is the breakdown of the Clueless-o-polis of the paternal organization.

Transcending the MacLeod hierarchy

The MacLeod hierarchy emerges because of a tension between globalism and localism, and the tendency for globalism to be implemented half-heartedly. People who are rich– here, I’m not talking about financial wealth so much as risk tolerance and the ability to withstand intermittent, short-term failures– want the localist right to exploit information (opportunities for profit) as soon as they discover it. Among the rich, there are those who intend to take the high road (Technocrats) and make the world genuinely better, and the degenerates (Psychopaths) who will exploit anything, even if it’s a negative- or zero-sum cost externalization. Those who are poor and don’t have the resources, capital, credibility or connections to survive a failure prefer the safety net provided by a globalist institution, whether it be a large private company or a government. The Losers are the poor who understand the trade (and defect if the organization shows malevolence or extreme incompetence) and take part, because they prefer or need stability. The evil of such organizations is not that the risk transfer exists and that the poor are rewarded “unfairly” by losing in expected-value terms– that is basic finance (here applied, additionally, to non-financial assets like social stability and credibility). It’s that the Psychopaths at the top of many organizations will do anything possible to drive the exchange rate (not set by a fair market) on this risk transfer as far out of whack as they can get it. The end-state is an organization where the low-level Losers get almost nothing in the way of risk reduction, but give up a lot in terms of compensation and advancement potential (that might enrich them and bring them out of involuntarily Loserism).

My contention is that the MacLeod hierarchy doesn’t emerge only out of peoples’ psychological traits and emotional tastes for various forms of risk. If that were the case, it would be inevitable, and organizations would invariably tend toward pathology. I don’t think it’s so. I think that the MacLeod issues come from rich and poor, which are not limited to financial wealth. So where do rich and poor come from? Ultimately, on the organizational setting, they come from credibility, which I’ve discussed previously. In most companies, the credibility of a non-managerial employee is almost zero. Credibility is intentionally made scarce within the organization. What happens when you lack credibility? Your ideas aren’t taken seriously, you don’t get to define appropriate use of your own working time, and if it goes to zero, you’re typically fired. In the MacLeod world, Losers acquire just enough credibility to feather a nest and, once done, stop gambling. Clueless lay down enormous amounts of effort to get credibility, mindless of the diminishing returns, and get some moderate amount. Sociopaths find the credibility black market (there always is one) and find the most efficient ways to cheat the system, and they get the most credibility of all.

At this point, we can discuss the four work cultures and their tendencies. The planned cultures are guild and rank cultures, and those have globalist intent. Professions, in fact, are globalist beyond the extent of one company, and usually exist to create a guild culture outside of it. The better of the two planned cultures is the guild culture, which replaces power relationships with mentors and proteges. The “boss” is a teacher. The pathological planned culture is the rank culture where blind subordination becomes requisite. The market cultures are the self-executive and tough cultures. Both hold the employee responsible for delivering value to the firm, and allow for localist autonomy of sub-organizations, but the difference is that the self-executive culture gives employees more time to bring their ideas to fruition and more opportunities for good-faith failure. Tough cultures have tight deadlines and no control over scope-of-work for low-level employees. The self-executive culture is the healthier of the two market cultures, and the tough culture is the pathological one.

What unifies the two healthy cultures, and the two pathological ones? It comes down to employee credibility. The credibility floor in the tough and rank cultures is zero. Employees are not held to be implicitly credible. An employee who can’t demonstrate hard value-add on a minute-by-minute basis fails in a tough culture. One who is disliked by his manager fails in rank culture. Both of these cultures, in functionality, are defined by the fear-driven, cutthroat, unethical, and often harmful activities in which normal people will engage when there’s a threat of their credibility levels dropping to an unacceptable level.

The healthy cultures, on the other hand, set a credibility floor, although they do it in markedly different ways. The guild culture has a rigid seniority system, but assumes the junior employee to be a student and therefore of value– especially future value– to the organization. The self-executive culture is a more localist, market-driven culture, but with the assumption that each employee has some quantum of irrevocable credibility– a real vote that can’t be taken away by a priapic manager.

Companies that establish a credibility floor will still exhibit shifts of influence and, if nothing else, inequalities in soft power. There will be cliques and the best one can do is to render them fairly harmless. There will also be attempts to game the system and amass credibility through a variety of means. Credibility trades, although they “shouldn’t” exist, will. That’s human nature. The difference is that, when a credibility floor exists, one doesn’t have the panic trading (which Psychopaths love, because it’s easiest to exploit) that generates organizational pathology at such a rate that it’s uncontrollable. The trade of credibility still exists, but it’s mostly harmless and does not reach a level that creates unmanageable organizational pathology. When there’s a credibility floor, the rate of corrosion is slow enough that attentive management can reverse the damage. When the credibility floor is zero and panic trading defines the organization, institutional corrosion is so rapid and ubiquitous that it can’t be halted. 

I must make one note, here: companies that intend to function without corrosion and pathology must establish a credibility floor. That’s not to say that they must employ unproductive or harmful individuals indefinitely. If someone punches another employee, he’s still “credible” in the abstract, but he’s every bit as fired, because what he did was wrong and dangerous. The purpose of a credibility floor isn’t to say that no one ever gets fired (that’s a horrible idea) but to prevent people from, in RPG terms, being “killed by the dice”– that is, fired because of credibility fluctuations, and not because they deserve it.

It’s the absence of a credibility floor that generates a permanent Loser caste (whose exchange rate in their requisite risk transfer becomes increasingly unfavorable) and a fear-driven, tunnel-visioned Clueless “useful idiot” class, leaving both groups prone to exploitative Sociopaths. So the question becomes, then: how does an organization create a credibility floor? How can one globally legislate an amorphous, hard-to-define, and often very local social asset? That’s an incredibly hard problem to solve, and where I intend to go next.

Psychopathy and superficial reliability

Lord Acton says: judge talent at its best and character at its worst. This is a wise principle, yet it fails us miserably when misapplied, as it often is in modern society. Why is that? The world is large, so our knowledge of each is extremely sparse. We often lack the information necessary to judge either talent or character well well. The consequence of information sparsity in judgment of talent is the existence of celebrity. It’s better to have everyone know that you’re a 6, than to be a 10 in secret. This itself is not so dangerous, but the contest for visibility, even in supposed meritocracies like the software industry, gets destructive quickly. Even in small companies, more effort is often expended to gain control of the division of labor (thus, one’s own visibility and reputation) than is spent actually completing the work. The fact that awful people are excellent at office politics is so well-known that it requires no documentation. It becomes visible within the first 6 months of one’s working life. This makes assessment of character as important as the judgment of skill and talent. Is the guy with the flashy resume a legitimate 99.99th-percentile talent, or a degenerate politicker and credit-taker who managed to acquire credibility? Reference checking is supposed to solve that, and it doesn’t work. I’ll get to that, a little bit later.

Information sparsity in the assessment of talent is a known danger, but I tend to see it as a short-term and minor threat. There’s probably an eventual consistency to it. Over time, people should converge to levels of challenge, responsibility, and influence commensurate with their ability. More dangerous, and infinitely more intractable, is the information sparsity that pertains to character. People tend to overestimate, by far, their ability to judge other peoples’ ethical mettle. In fact, the vast majority of them are easy to hack, and their excessive confidence in their own assessment is, in truth, easily used against them by the bad actors.

This problem is pretty much impossible to solve. Most people know from experience that the worst people– the psychopaths– are superficially charming, which means that personal impressions are of low value. What about getting access to the person’s history? In employment, that’s what reference checks are for, but shady characters often have great references. Why? Because they lie, extort, and manipulate people until their histories become not only socially acceptable but outright attractive. They hack people with as much skill and malice as the worst black-hat “crackers”. The people who are harmed by intensive reference checks are honest people with difficult histories, not the degenerate and dishonest who are the real threat.

My experience is that people lack the tools to judge others for character, at least at scale. Any fair punitive structure is predictable, and the most skilled of the bad actors will adapt. Any unpredictable punitive structure will be unfair, and rely on decisions made by influential humans, who are more likely than average to be psychopaths, and will certainly have psychopathic courtiers (whom the powerful person has not yet detected). The best one can do is to judge people by their actions, and to punish bad deeds swiftly and objectively. This is not a trivial art, of course.

Laws and imprisonment serve this punitive purpose, but most of the people in our jails are impulsive people of low social class, with only moderate overlap between the imprisoned population and the psychopaths. In employment, there’s a naive hope that, while psychopaths can climb high within corporations, they will eventually be unable to escape their histories and be flushed out of respectable careers. It never happens that way. Moral degenerates don’t get blacklisted. They acquire power and do the blacklisting.

One acquired strategy for dealing with such people is “Distrust everyone”. That’s how most seasoned managers and executives, having been robbed a couple times by dishonest subordinates, tend to view the people below them– with implicit, prevailing distrust. That strategy fails especially badly. Why? First, there are degrees of trust and distrust. Becoming a managerial favorite (managers are not always psychopaths, but managerial favorites almost always are) simply requires superiority in relative trust, not any level of absolute trust. Second, it’s functionally impossible to get a complex job done (much less lead a team) with prevailing total distrust of everyone, so people who “distrust everyone” are desperate for people they can give partial trust. Psychopaths play people with that attitude quite easily. It’s not even work for them. A boss who thinks his subordinates are all morons is surprisingly easy to hack.

The conclusion of all this is that, in defending scalable institutions such as corporations against psychopaths, we’re basically helpless. We don’t have the tools to detect them based on affability or social proof, and any strategy that we devise to deal with them, they will subvert to their own ends. We can’t “beat” them when they look exactly like us and will be undetected until it’s too late. Our best shot is not to attract them, and to avoid engaging in behaviors that make our institutions and patterns most easily hackable.

Despite our complete lack of ability to assess individuals for character at scale, we develop metrics for doing so that often not only fail us, but become tools of the psychopath. A going assumption that people make is that the small is indicative of the large. If Fairbanks is chilly in the summer, it must be frigid in the winter. (This applies to most climates, but not to San Francisco.) People who make occasional misspellings in email must be stupid. People who have mediocre accomplishments (by adult standards) at young ages are destined for adult brilliance. People who regularly take 75-minute lunches are “time-stealing” thieves.

Talent is judged in the workplace based on minor accomplishments, largely because there are so few opportunities for major accomplishment, and those are only available to the well-established. The guy who reliably hits a “6″ is judged to be capable of the “9″ (see: Peter Principle) while the one who gets bored and starts dropping “5″s is flushed out. Character is judged, similarly, based on useless and minor signals. The person who regularly arrives at 9:00, never says the wrong thing, and projects the image of a “team player” (whatever the fuck that means) gets ahead. What takes the place of character– which, I contend, cannot be assessed at scale and amid the extreme information sparsity of modern society– is superficial reliability. The people who pass what a company thinks are character and “culture fit” assessments are, rather than those of pristine character, the superficially reliable.

Who wins at this game? I wouldn’t say that it’s only psychopaths who win, but the best are going to be the psychopaths. The earnestly honest will break rules (formal and informal) to get work done. They care more about doing the right thing than being perceived the right way. Psychopaths are not by-the-word rule-followers with regard to formal policies, but they always follow the informal social rules (even to the breach of formal and less-powerful informal rules). They figure them out the quickest, have few distractions (since they rarely do actual work; that’s not what the office game is about!) and, fairly early on, find themselves in the position to make those rules. 

Superficial reliability works in favor of the worst people. Why? It evolves into a competition. Once everyone is in the office from 9:00 to 6:00, the new standard becomes 8:00 to 7:00. Then it’s 7:00 to 8:00, with expected email checking to 11:00. People start to fail. The noncompliant are the first to drop away and judged by the organism (the team, management) to have been the least dedicated, so it’s not seen as a loss. The next wave of failures are the enervated compliant, who meet the increasingly difficult standards but underperform in other ways. They spend their 13 hours at the office, but start making mistakes. They turn into temporary incompetents, and are flushed out as well. They’re not seen as a loss either. “We have a tough culture here.” As those burn off, people who were formerly at the center of the bell curve (in reliability, status, and performance) are now on the fringe, which means that there’s an atypically large set of people on the bubble, generating a culture of anxiety. They become catty and cutthroat now that the middle is no longer a safe place to be. People fight, and some come out of it looking so terrible that their reputations are ruined. They leave. Psychopaths rarely enter these contests directly, but evolve into puppet masters and arms dealers, ensuring that they win regardless of each battle’s outcome. Soon, the psychopath has entrenched himself as a key player in the organization. He’s not doing most of the work, but he’s feared by the actual stars, enough that they’ll let him take credit for their work and (in management’s eye) become one.

Most reliability contests work this way. There’s some performance metric where the bottom few percent justly deserve to be fired. As a limited measure, such a “sweep” is not a bad idea. (“Let’s stop paying the people who never show up.”) Management, however, is not measured or limited. It’s faddish, impulsive, absolute, and excessive. Whatever policy is used to separate from true underperformers (about 2%) must also be used to “stack rank” the other 98 percent. It’s no longer enough to enforce an honest 8-hour day; we must require an 11-hour day. This overkill damages the work environment and culture, and psychopaths thrive in damaged, opaque, and miserable environments.

Another example is reference checking in employment. The real purpose of the reference check is to discourage the morally average from lying about their histories, and it works. The moral “middle man” at the center of the ethical bell curve would probably lie on his resume given the right incentives, but would stop short of asking 3 friends to support the lie by posing as peers at jobs the person did not hold. Most people won’t make that kind of demand of people who aren’t close to them, but few people want to be seen as unethical by close colleagues. That is the point where the average person says, “Wait a minute, this might be wrong.” The classic, three-reference check also filters out the honest but undesirable candidates who just can’t find three people to recommend their work. It’s a reliability test, in that anyone who can’t find 3 people in his last 5 years to say good things about him is probably in that bottom 2% who are undesirable hires for that reasonl alone. Yet, at senior ranks in large companies, reference checking becomes a reliability contest, with 10 to 20 references– including “back channel” references not furnished by the candidate– being required. At that point, you’re selecting in favor of psychopaths. Why? Most honest people, playing fair, can’t come up with 20 references, nor have they engaged in the intimidation and extortion necessary to pass an intensive “back-channel” reference check in a world where even a modestly positive reference means no-hire. It’s those honest people who fail those cavity searches. A psychopath with no qualms about dishonesty and extortion can furnish 50 references. Beyond the “classic 3″, reference checking actually selects for psychopathy. 

Why do psychopaths never fail out, even of reliability contests designed to cull those of low character? The answer is that they have a limited emotional spectrum, and don’t feel most varieties of emotional pain, which makes them exceptionally good at such contests. They don’t become upset with themselves when they produce shoddy work– instead, they plan a blame strategy– so they don’t mind 15-hour days. (Office politics is a game for them, and one they love to play, so long hours don’t bother them.) They are emotionally immune to criticism as well. While they care immensely about their status and image, they have no reason to fear being dressed down by people they respect– because they don’t actually respect anyone. While psychopaths seem to despise losing, given the awful things they will do to avoid a minimal loss, even defeat doesn’t faze them for long. (This is an erroneous perception of the psychopaths; when we see psychopaths doing awful things to avoid minor losses, we assume they must have a desperate hatred of losing because we would require extreme circumstances in order to do such bad things. In truth, the difference is that they have no internal resistance against bad action.) Losses do not depress or hamper them. They pop right back up. Psychopaths are unbeatable. You can’t find them out until it’s too late, and whatever you try to kill them with is just as likely to hit someone innocent. Indeed, they thrive on our efforts to defeat them. When they are finally caught and prone, our punishments are often useless. There is truly “no there there” to a psychopath, and they have nothing to lose.

For an aside, I am not saying that we are powerless to curtail, punish, or rehabilitate the larger category of “bad actors”. Laws, social norms, and traditional incentives work well for normal people. Petty theft, for example, is rare because it is punished. Plenty of non-psychopaths would– out of weakness, desperation, curiosity, or even boredom– steal if they could get away with it. Jail time deters them. Prison is an environment to which normal people adapt poorly, and therefore an undesirable place to be. Psychopaths are different in many ways, one of which is that they are extremely adaptive. They love environments that others cannot stand, including prisons and “tough” workplace cultures. Punishing a psychopath is very hard, given his imperviousness to emotional pain. You could inflict physical pain or even kill him, but there would be no point. He would suffer, but he would not change.

Why does psychopathy exist? It’s useful to answer this question in order to best understand what psychopathy is. My best guess at it is that it has emerged out of the tension between two reproductive pressures– r- and K-selection– that existed in our evolutionary environment. An r-selective strategy is one that maximizes gross reproductive yield, or “spray and pray”. K-selective strategies are focused more on quality– fewer, more successful, offspring. The r-selective “alpha” male has a harem of 20 women and 200 children, most neglected and unhealthy. The K-selective “beta” has one wife and “only” 8 or 9 offspring, and invests heavily in their health. Neither is innately superior to the other; r-selective strategies repopulate quickly after a crisis, while K-selective quality-focused strategies perform well in stability. Human civilization has been the gradual process of the K-strategist “betas” taking over, first with monogamy and expected paternal investment, which was later extended to political and economic equality (because high-quality offspring will fare better in a stable and just world than a damaged one). Almost certainly, all humans possess a mix of “alpha” and “beta” genes and carry impulses from both evolutionary patterns, with the more civilized beta strategy winning over time, but not without a fight. Indeed, what we view as morally “good” in many societies is intimately connected with beta patterns– sexual restraint, nonviolence, positive-sum gradualism– while our concept of “sin” is tied to our alpha heritage. Psychopathy seems to be an adaptation in which the beta, or K-selective, tendencies of the mind are not expressed, allowing the alpha to run unchecked. In evolutionary terms, this made the individual more fit, although often at the expense of society.

Psychopaths (for obvious evolutionary reasons) like sex, status, and resources, but that alone doesn’t identify them, since almost everyone does. What differentiates the psychopath is the extreme present-time orientation, as well as the willingness to make ethical compromises to get them. The future-oriented, positive-sum mentality is absent in the psychopath. Unhampered by conscience, psychopaths quickly acquire resources and power, these being key (at least, throughout most of our evolutionary history) to reproductive proliferation. In business, their sexual appetites are not of major interest. What’s most relevant to our problem is their attraction to power and status. That is what they want. It’s only about money for them so far as it confers social status.

If we cannot defeat psychopaths, then what should we do? This turns out not to be a new problem– not in the least. Why, for example, do American elected officials draw such mediocre salaries? Why do we need all the checks and balances that make even the presidency so much damn work? Making power less attractive is one of the first principles of rational government, as the concept was developed during the Age of Reason. The reactionary clergies and hereditary aristocracies had to go– that much was clear– but how could one prevent a worse and more brutal lord from filling the vacuum? The idea was to compensate for power’s natural attractiveness by limiting it and attaching responsibilities. In the U.S., this even came to the matter of location, with the nation’s capital being chosen deliberately in an undesirable climate. In elected politics, I would say that this has mostly worked. We’ve had some downright awful political leaders, but a surprisingly low number (by corporate comparison) of psychopaths in top political positions. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that elected office doesn’t attract them, but other positions of power attract them much more. With the first-rate psychopaths making millions in the corporate world, the psychopaths who are attracted to elected political positions are the C-students in psychopath school.

Taking a macroscopic perspective, psychopathy is a very hard problem to solve. A closed system such as a nation-state has some probably invariant population of psychopaths that, inevitably, will be attracted to some variety of social status and dominance over other people. Flush them out of politics, and they end up in business. Yet if business were made unattractive due to an overpowered state (e.g. left-wing authoritarianism) they would end up back in government. They have to go somewhere, and it is impossible to identify them until they’ve done their damage (and, often, not even then). Yet the microeconomic problem for an individual firm is much easier– don’t attract psychopaths.

In technology, one strategy is Valve-style open allocation, under which employees are permitted to work for the firm directly rather than requiring managerial approval. Want to change projects? Move your desk and start. The typical extortion that middle managers use to build their careers– work for me or you don’t work here at all– doesn’t exist, because no one has that authority. Managerial authority attracts psychopaths like little else– more than money or prestige– and if one can do without it, one should consider doing so.

Much of the appeal of startups in technology is the perception (sometimes, an inaccurate one) that small technology companies haven’t yet been corroded and politicized by managerial extortions. In the ideal case, a startup operates under a constrained open allocation. It’s not yet “work on whatever you want”, because the startup requires intense focus on solving a specific problem, but employees are trusted to manage their own contribution. When do those companies go to closed allocation? Often, “hot” companies lose their cultural integrity in the process of hiring executives. The flashy career office-politician with impressive titles and “a track record” demands authority from the go, and it’s given to him. Five direct reports is not enough; he demands ten. He gets 15. Over time, employees lose status and autonomy as it’s chipped away to feed these people.

Most of the cultural losses that companies endure as they grow are suffered in the quest to hire executives from the outside, but what kind of person are you going to attract if you’re immediately willing to sell off your employees’ autonomy to “close a deal”? The people you’re most likely to get are those who enjoy power over people. Not all of these are psychopaths (some are mere narcissists or control freaks) but many are. Your culture will disappear rapidly.

If you’re running a typical VC-funded, build-to-flip operation, then hiring power-hungry external executives might be the way to go. A great way to buy an important decision-maker (an investor, an executive at an acquirer) is to give his underperforming friend an executive position at your company. You might take on a psychopath or few, but you’re not going to be in the company for very long, so it’s not your concern. On the other hand, if you want to build a stable company whose culture and values will still be worth a damn in 20 years, then you can’t do that. To the extent that your organization needs positions of power to function, you need to make them undesirable to the psychopath. This is one of the major reasons why you need intrinsic limits (checks and balances) on power.

Unfortunately for corporate executives, making a company less psychopath-friendly means equalizing the distribution of power and reward within companies. It means moving away from the CEO-as-king model and the eight-figure pay packages. Over the past forty years, we’ve been paying more and getting less when it comes to corporate management. Flushing out the psychopaths requires that we pay less, both financially and in terms of authority over other people, for managerial positions. The whole concept of what it means to be an “executive” will require reinvention as radical as the replacement of hereditary monarchs by elected legislators.

The stupid, superficial reliability contests that corporations use to assess character and protect themselves against psychopaths don’t work. In fact, they do the opposite, becoming the psychopath’s favorite tools. Companies that want to avoid being invaded and controlled by such people will have to reinvent themselves in a form radically unlike the traditional, hierarchical corporation.

A 3-tiered model of trust, and how con men hack people.

Something I’ve observed in a variety of human organizations, including almost all businesses, is that the wrong people are making major decisions. I’m not talking about second-best players or even mediocrities becoming leaders; I’m talking about the rise of people who shouldn’t even be trusted with a bag of rock salt. White-collar social climbers with no more integrity than common con artists are the ones to rise through the ranks, while the most honest people (some deserving, most not) are the ones to stagnate or be pushed out. Why is this happening? It’s not that all successful and powerful people are bad. Some are; most aren’t. The problem is more subtle: it’s that the wrong people are trusted. Good people are probably slightly more likely to succeed than bad people at forming companies, but bad people rise through the ranks and take them over nonetheless. To understand why this happens, it’s important to understand trust, and why it is so easy for a class of people to earn trust they don’t deserve, and to retain that trust in spite of bad actions.

As I work my way through George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, I’m starting to get a sense of just how well this author understands human nature. Unlike many fantasy novels with clear heroes and cosmic villains, the moral topology of Martin’s world is approached from several dog’s eye views, without omniscient or prescriptive narration. It’s not clear who the heroes and villains are. Charming characters can be treacherous, while those hardest to love are the most interesting. Martin writes using limited third-person narration, but each chapter from a different character’s point of view. What is most interesting is how the perception of a character changes once his or her intentions are revealed. In a novel, you actually can understand the motivations of characters– even dangerous and disliked ones like Jaime Lannister and Theon Greyjoy. You can get the whole story. In real life, people only get their own.

Something emerges as I relate the moral questions posed by narrative to the murkier world of human interaction, and it’s why people (myself included) are generally so awful at judging character. I’ve come to the conclusion that, subconsciously, most of us model the questions of peoples’ trustworthiness with a three-tiered approach. The superficial tier is that person’s speech and social skill. What does he say? The middle tier is the person’s actions. What does he do? The deepest tier is that person’s intention. What does he want? For better or worse, our tendency to separate people into “good” and “evil” relies on our assessment of a person’s true intention, rather than that person’s action.

A person who does seemingly bad things for good purposes is a dark hero, like Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series. A person who does good things for bad intentions (consider the Manhattan charity scene, a theater for social climbing more than service) is a disliked phony. This attitude would make a lot of sense, if we could reliably read peoples’ intentions. We develop first-degree trust in a person if we find that person to be socially pleasant. At this level, we’d invite that person to a party, but not share our deepest secrets. We develop second-degree trust in people who do things we like, and who refrain from doing things we dislike. Most people would call a mutual relationship of second-degree trust a friendship, although friendship involves other axes than trust alone. Third-degree trust is reserved for people we believe have the best intentions: people who might commit actions we dislike (potentially having information we don’t) but who we believe will do the right thing.

If the exploit isn’t visible, I’ll spell it out cleanly. In the real world, one really never knows what another person’s intentions are. That’s pure guesswork. Unlike in fiction, we only know our own intentions, and sometimes not even that. We have a desperate desire to know others’ intentions, but we never will. The quality of evidence available to us, even for the most perceptive and socially skilled people, is poor. So, this admits a hack. What tends to happen when knowledge is impossible to have but people desperately want it? People come up with explanations, and those with the most pleasing ones profit. Many religious organizations and movements exist on this principle alone. That which is said in the right way can appear to betray intentions. In other words, a first-level interaction (what the person says) is dressed up as carrying third-degree knowledge (of intimate intention).

This is how con artists work, but it also explains the operation of white-collar social climbers and the shenanigans that corporations use, in the guise of corporate “culture” and “changing the world”, to encourage naive young people to work three times as hard as they need to, for half the reward. They create a ruse of transparency about their intentions, earning some measure of third-degree trust from the naive. What this allows them to do is be malevolent on the second degree (i.e. perform bad actions, including those harming the finances and careers of their victims) and have a surprising number of loyal acolytes (including victims) making excuses for this behavior.

Essentially, this is the first tier of interaction and trust (the superficial one) overriding the second (of actions) by masquerading as the third (of intentions). It’s an exploit that exists because people don’t want to admit to the true nature of the world they live in, which is one where another person’s intentions are almost always opaque. This doesn’t mean most people are “bad” (not true) or have “hidden agendas” (true but irrelevant, in that all “agendas” are equally hidden)– it’s just the structural nature of a world where minds are very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to read. People have a hard time accepting this limitation, especially because the most socially confident seem not to have it, even though all people do. They compensate by developing the notion that they can read others’ intentions, a foolish confidence in their own social skill.

Some people are easy to read. For example, infants usually cry because they’re cold, hot, hungry, thirsty, or in pain. Children are, likewise, often relatively easy to read. The least socially skilled third of adults are generally easy to understand, at least partially, in this way. Moreover, assessments of motivation are often made as a sort of social punishment for undesirable actions: it’s bad enough for this person to be caught, but the insult is the assessment of his motivation. It’s a paternalistic way of calling someone a child. I know what you’re up to. It’s an assertion of confidence that often has no basis, but it gives a certain class of people confidence in their paternalistic superiority. People with this attitude tend to grow in their foolish confidence as they become more successful and powerful, and to their detriment. As they rise, they need lackeys and lieutenants and advisors. They need to trust people; most of all, they need to believe they can trust peoples’ intentions. Of course, they’ve also been shaped by experience into a person with supreme confidence in their own ability to judge others’ character…

Enter the psychopath. Contrary to popular depiction, most psychopaths are not murderers, rapists, or torturers. The majority of them are not violent, and those with violent intentions are usually able to have others do their dirty work. Most eschew violence, which is dangerous, illegal, and almost never confers any benefit (financial or social) in modern times. They’d rather rob people than kill them– it’s easier, and the rewards are greater. Also, it’s an open question whether psychopathy is “mental illness”, but there is no connection between psychopathy and psychosis, the latter rarely being associated with mental effectiveness or social skill. Instead, psychopaths’ minds tend to be as clear as anyone else’s. What characterizes the psychopath is a lack of conscience and an infinitely deep selfishness. Also, most of them are exceptionally skilled actors. Although their emotional growth tends to be stunted in childhood or adolescence, they can mimic as wide a range of emotions as anyone else. In fact, they are superior to typical people at having the “right” emotions for various circumstances. Psychopaths have no tell-tale signs, and they don’t seem like “mean” people. They are effectively invisible. Among the upper management of most companies, they are surprisingly common, yet never detected until after they’ve done their damage.

Psychopaths could not be more at home than they are in the white-collar social climbing theater of the typical corporation. The outsized rewards for corporate officers feed their narcissism, the intrigues enable their cutthroat tendencies, and their superficial charm enables their effortless rise. They acquire (misplaced) trust quickly, on account of their unusually high skill at emotional mimicry. They are not supernatural, so they cannot read the intentions of those they intend to please. Instead, they dress their intentions in such a way that the people in power will read whatever they want to see. Like “psychics”, they hedge what they say with the purpose of being right by those in power on account of flexible interpretation. They seem to have “vision” and character because they can exploit the “just like me” fallacy of their superiors. In reality, they are the worst kind of mercenary turncoat. Their “vision” is of themselves on top of something, but that could be a mountain of gold or of bones. They don’t care, as long as they win and others lose.

After a psychopath has run his course, the company where he worked is usually damaged immensely. Million- or billion-dollar losses can occur, top executives can be jailed, and thousands of jobs can be cut. Psychopaths burn whatever is no longer useful to them. After this, people tend to back-reason their interactions with that person. “I knew he was up to something.” “I never liked him.” In most cases, that’s not accurate. What really happened is this: it was obvious that this person’s actions (second level) were risky, harmful, or even criminal, but the person was so effective at making it seem that he had the right intentions (third level) that people ignored the obvious warning signs. They made excuses. They misinterpreted the person’s superficial charm as a sign of good intentions, and they were burned. Or, perhaps this word is better: they were hacked.

Criminal Injustice: The Bully Fallacy

As a society, we get criminal justice wrong. We have an enormous number of people in U.S. prisons, often for crimes (such as nonviolent drug offenses) that don’t merit long-term imprisonment at all. Recidivism is shockingly high as well. On the face of it, it seems obvious that imprisonment shouldn’t work. Imprisonment is a very negative experience, and a felony conviction has long-term consequences for people who are already economically marginal. The punishment is rarely appropriately matched to the crime, as seen in the (racially charged) discrepancies in severity of punishment for possession of crack vs. cocaine. What’s going on? Why are we doing this? Why are the punishments inflicted on those who fail in society often so severe?

I’ll ignore the more nefarious but low-frequency ills behind our heavy-handed justice system, such as racism and disproportionate fear. Instead, I want to focus on a more fundamental question. Why do average people, with no ill intentions, believe that negative experiences are the best medicine for criminals, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence that most people behave worst after negative experiences? I believe that there is a simple reason for this. The model that most people have for the criminal is one we’ve seen over and over: The Bully.

A topic of debate in the psychological community is whether bullies suffer from low or high self-esteem. Are they vicious because they’re miserable, or because they’re intensely arrogant to the point of psychopathy? The answer is both: there are low-self-esteem bullies and high-self-esteem bullies, and they have somewhat different profiles. Which is more common? To answer this, it’s important to make a distinction. With physical bullies, usually boys who inflict pain on people because they’ve had it done to themselves, I’d readily believe that low self-esteem is more common. Most physical bullies are exposed to physical violence either by a bigger bully or by an abusive parent. Also, physical violence is one of the most self-damaging and risky forms of bullying there is. Choosing the wrong target can put the bully in the hospital, and the consequences of being caught are severe. Most physical bullies are, on account of their coarse and risky means of expression, in the social bottom-20% of the class of bullies. On the whole, and especially when one includes adults in the set, most bullies are social bullies. Social bullies include “mean girls”, office politickers, those who commit sexual harassment, and gossips who use the threat of social exclusion to get their way. Social bullies may occasionally use threats of physical violence, usually by proxy (e.g. a threat of attack by a sibling, romantic partner, or group) but their threats generally involve the deployment of social resources to inflict humiliation or adversity on other people. In the adult world, almost all of the big-ticket bullies are social bullies.

Physical bullies are split between low- and high-self-esteem bullies. Social bullies, the only kind that most people meet in adult life, are almost always high-self-esteem bullies, and often get quite far before they are exposed and brought down. Some are earning millions of dollars per year, as successful contenders in corporate competition. Low self-esteem bullies tend to be pitied by those who understand them, which is why most of us don’t have any desire to hunt down the low self-esteem bullies who bothered us as children. It’s high self-esteem bullies that gall people the most. High self-esteem bullies never show remorse, often are excellent at concealing the damage they do, even to the point of bringing action consequences of their actions to the bullied instead of to themselves, and they generally become more effective as they get older. It’s easy to detest them; it would be unusual not to.

How is the high self-esteem bully relevant to criminal justice? At risk of being harsh, I’ll assert what most people feel regarding criminals in general, because for high-self-esteem bullies it’s actually true: the best medicine for a high self-esteem bully is an intensely negative and humiliating experience, one that associates undesirable and harmful behaviors with negative outcomes. This makes high-self-esteem bullies different from the rest of humanity. They are about 3 percent of the population, and they are improved by negative, humiliating experiences. The other 97 percent are, instead, made worse (more erratic, less capable of socially desirable behavior) by negative experiences.

The most arrogant people only respond to direct punishment, because nothing else (reward or punishment) can matter to them, coming from people who “don’t matter” in their minds. Rehabilitation is not an option, because such people would rather create the appearance of improvement (and become better at getting away with negative actions) than actually improve themselves. The only way to “matter” to such a person is to defeat him. If the high-self-esteem bully’s negative experiences are paralyzing, all the better.

Before going further, it’s important to say that I’m not advocating a massive release of extreme punishment on the bullies of the world. I’m not saying we should make a concerted effort punish them all so severely as to paralyze them. There are a few problems with that. First, it’s extremely difficult to determine, on an individual basis, a high self-esteem bully from a low-self-esteem one, and inflicting severe harm on the latter kind will make him worse. Humiliating a high-self-esteem bully punctures his narcissism and hamstrings him, but doing so to a low-self-esteem bully accelerates his self-destructive addiction to pain (for self and others) and leads to erratic, more dangerous behaviors. What comes to mind is the behavior of Carl in Fargo: he begins the film as a “nice guy” criminal but, after being savagely beaten by Shep Proudfoot, he becomes capable of murder. In practice, it’s important to know which kind of bully one is dealing with before deciding whether the best response is rehabilitation (for the low self-esteem bully) or humiliation (for the high self-esteem bully). Second, if bullying were associated with extreme punishments, the people who’d tend to be attracted to positions able to affix the “bully” label would be, in reality, the worst bullies (i.e. a witch hunt). That high self-esteem bullies are (unlike most people) improved by negative experience is a fact that I believe few doubt, but “correcting” this class of people at scale is a very hard problem, and doing so severely involves risk of morally unacceptable collateral damage.

How does this involve our criminal justice policy? Ask an average adult to name the 3 people he detests most among those he personally knows, and it’s very likely that all will be high self-esteem bullies, usually (because physical violence is rare among adults) of the social variety. This creates a template to which “the criminal” is matched. We know, as humans, what should be done to high-self-esteem bullies: separation from their social resources in an extremely humiliating way. Ten years of extremely limited freedom and serious financial consequences, followed by a lifetime of difficulty securing employment and social acceptance. For the office politicker or white-collar criminal, that works and is exactly the right thing. For the small-time drug offender or petty thief? Not so much. It’s the wrong thing.

Most caught criminals are not high self-esteem bullies. They’re drug addicts, financially desperate people, sufferers of severe mental illnesses, and sometimes people who were just very unlucky. To the extent that there are bullies in prison, they’re mostly the low-self-esteem kind– the underclass of the bullying world, because they got caught, if for no other reason. Inflicting negative experiences and humiliation on such people does not improve them. It makes them more desperate, more miserable, and more likely to commit crimes in the future.

I’ve discussed, before, why Americans so readily support the interests of the extremely wealthy. Erroneously, they believe the truly rich ($20 million net worth and up) to be scaled-up versions of the most successful members of the middle class. They conflate the $400,000-per-year neurosurgeon who has been working hard since she was 5 with the parasite who earns $3 million per year “consulting” with a private equity firm on account of his membership in a socially-closed network of highly-consumptive (and socially negative) individuals. Conservatives mistake the rich for the highly productive because, within the middle class, this correlation of economic fortune and productivity makes some sense, while it doesn’t apply at all to society’s extremes. The same is at hand in the draconian approach this country takes to criminal justice. Americans project the faces of the bullies onto the criminal, assuming society’s worst actors and most dangerous failures to be scaled-up version of the worst bullies they’ve dealt with. They’re wrong. The woman who steals $350 of food from the grocery store out of desperation is not like the jerk who stole kids’ lunch money for kicks, and the man who kills someone believing God is telling him to do so (this man will probably require lifetime separation from society, for non-punitive reasons of public safety and mental-health care) is not a scaled-up version of the playground bully.

In the U.S., the current approach isn’t working, of course, unless its purpose is to “produce” more prisoners (“repeat customers”). Few people are improved by prison, and far fewer are helped by the extreme difficulty that a felony conviction creates in the post-incarceration job search. We’ve got to stop projecting the face of The Bully onto criminals– especially nonviolent drug offenders and mentally ill people. Because right now, as far as I can tell, we are The Bully. And reviewing the conservative politics of this country’s past three decades, along with its execrable foreign policy, I think there’s more truth in that claim than most people want to admit.